The entire American internet experience is now at risk of turning into a walled garden of corporate control because the FCC chickened out and picked the wrong words in 2002, and the court called them on it twice over. You used the wrong words. The court even agreed with the FCC’s policy goals — after a bitterly fought lawsuit and thousands of pages of high-priced arguments from Verizon and its supporters, Judge Tatel was convinced that "broadband providers represent a threat to internet openness and could act in ways that would ultimately inhibit the speed and extent of future broadband deployment."

This is Internet 3.0. With yesterday's court ruling saying that the FCC can not implement the net neutrality rules they adopted a while back, this nightmare is a likely reality. Telcos will pick their preferred partners, subsidize the data costs for those apps, and make it much harder for new entrants to compete with the incumbents.

Majority Op. at 33. So much for the terms in section 706 » “promote competition in the local telecommunications market” or “remove barriers to infrastructure investment.” Presto, we have a new statute granting the FCC virtually unlimited power to regulate the Internet. This reading of § 706, as we said in Comcast Corp. v. FCC, “would virtually free the Commission from its congressional tether.” 600 F.3d 642, 655 (D.C. Cir. 2010). The limiting principles the majority relies on are illusory.

Caught in the middle is the original idea of the Internet and the web, that people could be media instead of just consuming it. For that to continue, enough people have to see their future as publishing independently, and enough people have to read indpenedently of corporate media, neither originating from Silicon Valley or Hollywood, to keep the flame alive.

I still hope that there's a remnant of the idealism of tech. That there was value in the personal-ness of PCs. The net is the same way. We need to make it always-easier for people to own and run their own infrastructure. People think it's hard, but it doesn't have to be!